Oracle seeks faster grids

Tangosol buys scalability

In buying Tangosol, Oracle wants to provide computer grids with linear performance and scalability improvements when users add servers to their configuration, Oracle senior vice president Thomas Kurian has said.

With the plan, Oracle has high hopes in boosting grid performance in transactional environments.

Tangosol and its Coherence data grid software are slated to become part of Oracle next month as part of an agreement announced at the end of last week.

With the Tangosol buy, Oracle plans to integrate Coherence with Oracle products and also continue to sell it separately, Kurian said. Oracle has been focused on building out computer grids that combine the power of multiple servers for use in transactional systems that run its database and middleware.

"The unique thing that Tangosol does is it combines both performance improvements as well as scalability improvements at the same time," Kurian said. He would not comment on how much Oracle is paying for Tangosol.

In one instance, a bank that had a risk calculation program that had taken 50 days to run saw the time required drop to one hour after using Tangosol's technology, Tangosol president and chief executive, Cameron Purdy said.

Tangosol is to become an Oracle business unit, Purdy said. The two companies already have shared customers using Oracle and Tangosol software together, Kurian said.